Michelle Bastian (Edinburgh)

Tagging turtles and chasing ghosts: exploring the times and spaces of extinctions
In this time of habitat pressures and a changing climate, the relationships that make time and space are shifting. This paper offers a creative reflection on the lives of leatherback turtles by drawing out the frayed threads of what Deborah Bird Rose has called 'multi-species knots of ethical time' (2012). I follow the rhythms and spacings that join turtles with jaguars and jellyfish as each attempts to recalibrate the time of life to new conditions and explore the efforts of these creatures to actively make new futures for themselves, even when larger cycles and rhythms might be working against them. Throughout I reflect on human modes of time-telling and ask how they might be re-tuned and re-entrained to the present moment (which one?).

Michelle Bastian is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on the role of time in social practices of inclusion and exclusion. She has explored this in relation to feminist theories of community, local food, political apologies, more-than-human participatory research, clocks, leatherback turtles, transition towns and sustainable economies. Her work has been published in Time & Society; Theory, Culture & Society; and Environmental Philosophy.